Theorist’s View of Mississippi River as the West Sea

Heartland theorists such as Rodney Meldrum, Wayne May, Jonathan Neville, and others, have all had great difficulty in creating a location map of Lehi’s Land of Promise within what is now the United States—that matches Mormon’s many descriptions. Unfortunately, all have difficulty in arranging lands and major cities, like Nephi, Zarahemla and Bountiful, within Mormon’s descriptions of the Nephite/Lamanite lands.

One of those errors is found in the inaccurate widening of the middle and lower Mississippi River so it looks more consistent with Heartland theorists labeling it a “Sea” and not a “River.” However, it is only a river, albeit a major one, according to the U.S. Geologic Survey, and they show through tons of research into the river that it has always has been a free-flowing river. In fact, it has by far the fastest discharge, or stream flow velocity, discharging 593,000 cubic feet per second—compared to the next fastest, the Ohio, at 281,500 cubic feet per second.

It might be of interest to note that the St. Lawrence River, which Great Lakes theorists claim Lehi sailed up, discharges 348,000 cubic feet per second—which creates quite a current to sail against in a ship “driven forth by the wind,” as does the Niagara River, flowing at 204,700 cubic feet per second.

 The Mississippi has changed its river bed many times over the course of thousands of years—but it has always been just a river    (From the 1944 Mississippi River Commission)

 

Stated differently, despite theorist maps fudging the Mississippi’s width, the river flows southward from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, 2,320 miles in length, and has always been a river—changing its river bed several times over the centuries, but a river none-the-less.

The Mississippi and it chief tributary, the Missouri River, which is the longest river in North America at 2,341 miles, together make up one of the largest river systems in the world—about 3700 miles in length—and presently affords about 14,000 miles of navigable waterways and drains about 1,250,000 square miles, or about one-third of the total area of the United States.

The two rivers flow together just north of St. Louis, Missouri, and for miles the two big rivers flow side by side in one bed while their waters scarcely mingle—the red waters of the Missouri in sharp contrast to the clear current of the Mississippi. Later, these waters mix, and the Mississippi shows the muddy color for which it is famous in the South (along the lower river). 150 miles below the confluence with the Missouri is the confluence with the Ohio River.

The Mississippi has about 250 tributaries, with some of these branches as large, or larger than the Mississippi, and reach as far away as Montana and Wyoming, and western New York and western North Carolina. From the east come the Ohio River, Illinois, Wisconsin and the Yazoo; from the West flow the Arkansas, Red and the Missouri.

The 979-mile long Ohio River, with an annual rainfall of 40 to 50 inches, pours the most amount of water into the Mississippi. Where these tributaries empty into the Mississippi, it is called a confluence and forms the mouth of the tributary.

In 1828 in New England, where Joseph Smith was born and raised, the word “head” in relation to a river or stream meant: “The principal source of a stream; as the head of the Nile,” and “Head: To originate; to spring; to have its source, as a river (emphasis added).

As an example, the source, or “head” or beginning of the Missouri River is at the confluence of the Gallatin, Madison, and Jefferson Rivers in the Rocky Mountains at Three Forks, Montana, and its mouth or confluence with the Mississippi is at St. Louis, Missouri.

Along this same line, the “head” or source of the Ohio River is the confluence of the Allegheny River and the Mohohgahela River in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. These two rivers join together to form the Ohio River. This is not how the Mississippi River was formed, despite Meldrum’s constant claim to the contrary—the Mississippi River originated in Minnesota and flowed 1250 miles before it reached Cairo where the Ohio ran into the Mississippi. 

Map not drawn to scale nor does it represent distances—it is merely to show relationships of locations to each other and to the head of the Sidon River

 

Thus, it is inarguable when Mormon writes: “by the head of the river Sidon” (Alma 22:27), that he is referring to where the source or beginning of the River Sidon was located, i.e., when speaking of the “Narrow Strip of Wilderness,” Mormon tells us that “and thus were the Lamanites and Nephites divided,” (by this Narrow Strip of Wilderness that ran “from the Sea East to the Sea West”) and “by the head of the River Sidon,” that the source of the Sidon “was on the north” of the Narrow Strip of Wilderness, by the Land of Zarahemla.

Each of these major rivers flow into the Mississippi, thus having an ending, or mouth, at the confluence of the two rivers. Stated differently, their heads, or origins, are far away in the mountains or higher plateaus and their mouths, or source, or the ending of a river where it flows into the sea or into a main or larger river. Contrary to Meldrum’s and other Heartland theorists claims, the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers is the source of the lower Mississippi River, and thus referred to in Mormon’s description as its “head.” Where these two mighty rivers meet at Cairo, Illinois, the Ohio is actually the larger; thus, below the Ohio confluence the Mississippi swells to more than twice the size beyond this point.

At Lake Itaxca, in South Clearwater, Minnesota, the river begins with a five-foot width and widens to between 20-30 feet as it moves east toward the lake region; 35 miles east, at Lake Winnibigoshish, near Bena, the Mississippi is 11 miles wide, beyond that it narrows to two miles across at Lake Pepin,

Once past the lake region, the river’s widest point in the Upper region of the river is

403 feet at Wabasha, just past the confluence of the Chippewa River; 435 feet at Winona; and expands to one mile across, just downstream from its confluence with the Missouri River, near Alton, Illinois. Where most of the Corps of Engineers  have done the most work in deepening the river bed is between Baton Rouge, where the river is 2300 feet wide and 50 feet deep, and the widest spot in Louisiana is in East Carroll Parish at 7600 feet.; the narrowest is near Bayou Sara at 1700 feet.

Algiers Point in New Orleans. The deepest area of the Mississippi River

 

Its deepest point is 200 feet between the Governor Nicholls wharf and Algiers Point in New Orleans, a crescent-shaped navigational bend in the Mississippi, three miles south of Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. The Algiers Point-Canal Street Ferry crosses the Mississippi here (it was highlighted in the movie “Déjà Vu,” with Denzel Washington).

The mouth is within the delta at the Gulf of Mexico, where the river has changed its course several times through a process referred to as avulsion (delta switching). The process occurs due to large deposits of silt and sediment that cause the raising of its level and causing it to eventually find a steeper, more direct route to the Gulf of Mexico.

Since 1930, the Army Corps of Engineers has been tasked with dredging the river to maintain a nine-foot deep navigation channel. That action takes place upriver using a boat operated by the Corps' St. Paul district called The Goetz Dredge. "Under optimum conditions, the dredge can pump as much as 1,300 cubic yards per hour as far as 1,650 feet and up to 800 feet inland," the Corps says. "Booster pumps are sometimes used in combination with the Goetz to pump material up to approximately 10,000 feet."

It should be kept in mind that in the lower portion of the Mississippi, the river moves very slowly. It's a broad, shallow river

Sometimes, when a river overflows its banks, it can reach a new channel that provides a more direct pathway to wherever the river wants to go. If that happens, the new channel can become the main channel. If the Mississippi were allowed to do what it wanted, what is now the Atchafalaya River would become the new ending of the Mississippi. Again, in a purely natural world, that would be a six of one, half dozen of the other situation. But now human systems depend on the Mississippi remaining roughly as it was in 1900 when building began constructing massive amounts of infrastructure. In addition, the lower Mississippi isn't straight. Because it's moving slowly and meandering, there are bends up and down it. Human beings have liked to cut channels between pieces of the river in order to cut down on the river miles in a given trip. But the Mississippi tends to fill itself up with soil and sand. That problem's been exacerbated by excessive soil runoff from agriculture and other land-use change in the middle of the country.

The point of all this is not to inform details about the Mississippi River and its tributaries, but to show that no matter how much Rod Meldrum, Jonathan Neville, and other Heartland theorists want to claim—throughout the history of man, the Mississippi River has been just that, a river. It was never a sea, which eliminates all claim of Meldrum and others that the Heartland was where Lehi Landed and Nephi built his city.